As I already mentioned in last months issue, I ported buzztard and gst-buzztard to use gstreamer-1.0. It will require 1.1.X for some fixes in gstreamer itself. So how did it went. The basic porting to make it compile against 1.0 took about 20 hours spread over a couple of days. It is quite straight forward. I updated the porting guide where things were not mentioned.

The more tricky part where the soft api changes. At this port I was running the apps with G_DEBUG=fatal_warnings. The property name changes here and there we easy to fix. Also request pad name changes (%d -> _%u) took not too long to handle. Other things like caps negotiation kept me busy for a few evenings. For once I was e.g. writing GST_AUDIO_NE ("S16") instead of GST_AUDIO_NE (S16) which leads to caps negotiation failing. Another recommendation is to avoid setting channel-mask=3 for stereo caps. It is purely optional, most elements drop it anyway and by leaving it out, you can merge the mono and stereo caps.

I ported freeverb in plugins-bad and made fixed to audiopanorama and adder. Adder and collectpads have a few more new tests upstream. Another things that took a while was getting seek-in-ready to work again. Buzztard needs to configure the playback segment from the application, as the sources happy beep for all eternity. In 0.10 I could send a seek to my bin in ready, in 1.0 it gets dropped (pads are flushing). Now I recursively iterate over sources and seek on all of them. This is only needed to get to playing. To get these things fixed I ported a few of my stand alone examples, but the majority of this is still left unported.

Now the basics seem to work. I am confident that I can fix the remaining issues in march and look forward to attend the hackfest in Milano over easter.

The other thing I was doing this month was to experiment with embeddable scripting engines. I wrote a toy gtk app that opens a window, sets up the scripting engine, registers a function to get the window handle and start a script that calls the function to get the window and adds a vbox with two labels. I did that for lua, seed and gjs. For lua it took 30 min, for seek it took 30min, for gjs it took 2 hours and is still not working fully (the custom function returning a gobject).